Student groups take home $40,000 in prizes
The Lumpkin Auditorium was packed with neckties and pantsuits Tuesday night as student entrepreneurs behind seven startups competed for more than $40,000 in cash and prizes.
The Proving Ground, an entrepreneurial competition in its third year at USC, awarded winners with cash prizes of $5,000, $10,000 and $15,000, as well as services from sponsors. The winners were named based on business models that brought together potential social impact, new innovations and advanced technologies.
Many of the participants were students in the International Masters of Business Administration program, though the competition drew students from environmental health science and biochemistry as well.
The competition was set smack in the middle of Global Entrepreneurship Week, which former United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown began in 2008 to promote the growth of business worldwide.
“It’s an incredible week for Columbia and an incredible week for South Carolina,” said Greg Hilton, executive director at the Center for Entrepreneurial and Technology Innovation. “We want to strengthen the sense of entrepreneurship here in Columbia and throughout South Carolina. We want to support the next generation of entrepreneurs.”
A panel of six, including USC alumnus Josh Hackler, the president and founder of wine company Spanish Vines, and Student Body Vice President Chase Mizzell, judged the business pitches and helped pick who would receive the thousands of dollars in prize money and services.
The winners were announced after each individual or group pitched their business and answered questions from the panel.
The largest prize, the $15,000 SCRA Technology prize, was awarded to software startup HuddleHR. The Innovista Innovation Prize of $10,000 was given to myBuddy, an English-language tutoring service targeted at Korean students, and Watsi, a health care donation site modeled after businesses like the microloan site Kiva.org, won the Maxient Social Impact Prize of $5,000.